英原文／鲍朴；AI译中文本 | 转自 新世纪

书评内容：

《老子：关于「德」与「道」的经典》（Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and The Way），梅维恒（Victor H. Mair）着；班腾书店（Bantam Books）出版

《老子古今：五种对勘与析评引论》，刘笑敢着；中国社会科学出版社出版

注：「Dao De Jing」、「Tao Te Ching」和「Laozi」皆指同一个文本，即中国古代经典《道德经》或称《老子》。 「Tao」与「Dao」仅为「道」的不同音译方式。

2026年6月的最后一周，两位在中国古代经典《道德经》研究领域备受尊敬的学者相继离世。他们出生相差不到四岁，逝世时间也仅隔两天。梅维恒（Victor Henry Mair）是美国汉学家、宾夕法尼亚大学中国文学教授，生于1943年，于6月28日逝世；刘笑敢是北京师范大学道家哲学教授，生于1947年，于6月30日逝世。两人都在各自的知识传统中取得了重大突破，并在各自的学术社群中享誉盛名。

两国公众对其逝世的反应皆颇为冷淡，这反映出大众对其专业领域的认知相当有限。然而，这种相对的沉默隐藏了中美共同面临的危机四伏的飘摇之态：双方都不知道是否能够避免一场足以冲击全世界的毁灭性武装冲突之际，文化与文明的交流却大多停滞在边缘状态。

两位学者学术生涯终点的表面相似性，掩盖了一个更深层且日益紧迫的问题——这已成为当前国际焦虑的主要来源。 「多元现代性」（multiple modernities）这一在21世纪之交被提出，并且非常值得关注的论点[1]，似乎描绘了当前正在浮出水面的现实。当代的中国正日益展现出其对「现代性」的理解与西方有着根本性的不同。作为同代学者，梅维恒与刘笑敢提供了一个极具启示性的范例，展示了「现代化」如何沿着中西各自独立的认知路径发展，即便这些路径曾在同一部古代经典上交汇。

这两位学术生涯的交汇点可以追溯到1972年。那一年，美国总统尼克森（Richard Nixon）访问中国并会见了毛泽东，标志着冷战时期中美和解的开始。在美国，《时代》杂志将一本带有新时代（New Age）色彩的《道德经》译本列入圣诞节推荐书单，预示着这部中国古代经典正成为西方大众精神生活中历久弥新的元素。同样在1972年的中国，考古学家发掘了长沙马王堆汉墓，该墓葬属于西汉早期（西元前206年—西元9年）的一个贵族家庭。随着随后几个月发掘工作的推进，3号墓中出土了两份《道德经》帛书，即约西元前168年的马王堆帛书甲本与乙本。这些手稿比当时通行的版本至少早了五个世纪。

在1972年，梅维恒和刘笑敢的学术道路都尚未完全定型。直到1976年，这两份经修复的帛书照片图版及完整文本释文，才以单着形式首次供学者和公众查阅。当时，梅维恒正在哈佛大学攻读中国研究，并于当年获得博士学位。而刘笑敢的学术之路则因历史环境遭遇了更深刻的延宕。作为20世纪下半叶的本土中国学者，这身份并未必然让他更接近这部古代经典。相反地​​，刘笑敢接受基础教育的时期，传统文化正遭受批判，古典文本也基本上从正规教育课程中被抹去。在刘笑敢成年时，已经鲜少有人能在没有白话翻译的帮助下阅读文言文。直到1978年文革后恢复研究生招生，刘笑敢才被北京大学哲学系录取，并于1981年获得哲学硕士学位。

1980年，一份更为精校且具权威性的马王堆帛书版本终于出版。当梅维恒决定翻译《道德经》时，他完全意识到其中近乎无法克服的困难：文本看似简短实则高深、语言密度极高，且诠释的可能性似乎无穷无尽。二十年来，他曾誓言「绝不尝试翻译《道德经》」。然而，新发现的马王堆手稿改变了他的想法。他相信，这些手稿使得「产生一个比以往出版的任何译本都更准确、更可靠的全新《道德经》译本」成为可能。他的译本于1990年问世，此时距离刘笑敢于1993年获得北京大学哲学博士学位还有三年。刘笑敢随后成为道家思想领域最受推崇的专家之一。

自西元二世纪以来，围绕《道德经》展开的研究著作数量多得惊人，无数的「注」（对经典文本的重新阐释）与「疏」（对前人注解的进一步解释）层出不穷。梅维恒指出，其数量已「超过一千五百种」。

追随其前辈英国汉学家亚瑟·威利（Arthur Waley, 1889-1966）的脚步，梅维恒将这些后世的衍生变化视为理解原文真实含义的障碍。正如威利在1934年所言：「从王弼（约西元240-249年）以降直到18世纪的所有评论都是『经院式』的；也就是说，每个评论家都根据自己特定的教义来重新诠释文本，而无意或不想去发现其原本的含义。从我的观点来看，它们因此是毫无用处的。」透过使用已知最早的手稿进行翻译，梅维恒认为「有可能剥离两千年来因各种宗教、哲学和政治意图而试图『改良』文本的注释与诠释，清除其造成的扭曲与遮蔽。」

这种对《道德经》历史累积与文本流变的看法，本质上成为梅维恒与刘笑敢研究方法的分水岭。在刘笑敢对该文本展开成熟研究时，一个更早的版本已然面世：1993年出土的郭店楚墓竹简老子（一般认为约西元前300年）。其字体古老，内容仅约为现今通行本的五分之二，且章次与标准版本大相径庭。刘笑敢率先将包括最早竹简本在内的五个重要版本进行逐字比对（原文对照）；接着，他选取了文本异同的典型案例，以探究该文本历史演变的本质（对勘举要）；最后，也是至关重要的是，他透过现代哲学训练的视角提出了自己的诠释，并广泛地与西方知识传统展开对话（析评引论）。

尽管采用了不同的方法，两位学者都获得了极具价值的洞见。梅维恒并非第一个提出《道德经》在凝聚成相对固定的成文手稿前存在「口传史」的人。然而，他是现代英语世界中这一观点最有力、最坚定的推动者之一。他透过指出文本内部的重复、押韵、公式化表述和谐音模式，使这一论点极具说服力；这或许受到了西方关于《伊利亚德》和《奥德赛》等荷马史诗背后口传传统研究的启发。这种比较视角无疑丰富了中国对《老子》文本前历史的理解，这是一个至关重要但仍有待开发的领域，尤其考虑到中国对写作文字的深厚崇敬（即古语所云的「文以载道」）。

在关于「意义」的问题上，刘笑敢也取得了实质性的突破。透过文本对勘，刘笑敢试图解释《老子》文本为何会如此演变。在此过程中，他以现代实证方法证实了传统中国学者长期以来心领神会、且被20世纪学者如余英时以当代语言所描述的现象：

「经典之所以历久而弥新正在其对于不同时代的读者，甚至同一时代的不同读者，有不同的启示。但是这并不意味着经典的解释完全没有客观性，可以兴到乱说。」[2]

这种区别可以理解为「本义」（meaning）与「衍生义/时代意义」（significance）的不同[3]。文本中所包含的客观性属于其原始的「本义」——这正是亚瑟·威利和梅维恒等翻译家试图透过文献学分析来恢复的层面。然而，中国的古代经典（或称「经」）从来不仅仅是一个固定的文字客体。它是一个旨在随历史环境变化而激发新洞见的文本，允许读者将自身的知识、经验和时代关怀带入其中。这种当代的启示，便可称之为它的「衍生义/时代意义」。

梅维恒本人沉浸于对「本义」的探求，并对自己获得的洞见引以为傲。在准备译本时，他写道自己花了「整整两个月」的时间，只为替「德」寻找一个满意的英文对应词。他最终选择了「integrity」（完整/正直）而非「virtue」（美德），因为他希望这个词的范畴更广，而不仅仅带有狭隘的道德化暗示。相比之下，刘笑敢则毫不避讳讨论文本的当代意义。在他的著作中，「民主」与第49章相联系，「科学」与第40和47章交织，而「女性主义」则与第6章呼应，诸如此类。

当梅维恒于1990年出版其译本时，《道德经》在英语世界已经有了百余种译本。自那时起，英文版本的数量持续增长，根据大众统计清单，仅仅针对第一章的英译版本就已记录了175种以上[4]。西方有许多读者和学者从老子那里获得了真正的启示。然而，这些知识如何被运用于更广泛的战略利益（如果确实有被运用的话），目前仍不明朗。

诚如我们现今所知，《道德经》一直是中国文明的基石文本，在其历史发展是延续中国文明活力「道统」存在的鲜明例证。在中国，截至2025年，对《道德经》的研究著作总数估计高达约3,700部[5]。自马王堆帛书出版以来，涌现出的注释译本、专题研究和大众解读数量，远远超过了以往所有时代的总和。尽管一般大众对这一专业领域的进展大多不甚了了，但部分读者可能已经开始将源自老子的洞见，应用于人工智能、管理学以及商业战略等全新领域。

因此，梅维恒与刘笑敢为《道德经》带来的突破，皆以各自的方式展现出重大意义。他们平行的人生轨迹所揭示的，不仅仅是对一部古代经典的共同学术兴趣。他们的影响力在西方与中国这两个独立的知识传统中悄然展开。他们共同照亮了现代社会对中国经典的两种截然不同的接轨方式，或许，也昭示了两个现代世界之间那日益引人注目且影响深远的分流。

尾注：

[1] 该词主要与以色列社会学家萨缪尔·诺亚·艾森斯塔特（Shmuel N. Eisenstadt）相关，特别是他发表在《代达罗斯》（Dædalus）2000年专刊上的论文《多元现代性》（Multiple Modernities）。

[2] 由本文作者英译。原中文引自：余英时，《犹记风吹水上鳞》，弘雅三民图书股份有限公司，2022年。

[3] 「meaning」与「significance」在该中文著作中即以英文标注：余英时，《犹记风吹水上鳞》，弘雅三民图书股份有限公司，2022年。

[4] 数据由 ChatGPT 于 2026-07-06 估算，提示词为：「在梅维恒译本之前和之后，总共有多少个《道德经》的英文译本？」

[5] 数据由 DeepSeek 于 2026-07-06 估算，提示词为：「请估算一下中国历史上总共出版过多少对《道德经》的研究，请按时期列出 。」

China and the West: Heading towards different modernities?

By Bao Pu

Reviewed:

1. Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and The Way, by Victor H. Mair 梅维恒; Bantam Books

2. Laozi Ancient and Modern《老子古今 五种对勘与析评引论》, by Liu Xiaogan 刘笑敢; China Social Sciences Press中国社会科学出版社

NOTE: “Dao De Jing”, “Tao Te Ching” and “Laozi” all refer to the same thing: 道德经the Chinese ancient text by Laozi老子. “Tao” and “Dao” are different transliterations of the same concept.

Two respected scholars of the ancient Chinese classic Dao De Jing were born within four years of each other and died within two days of each other in the last week June 2026. One was American, the other Chinese. Victor Henry Mair 梅维恒, an American Sinologist and professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, was born in 1943 and died on June 28. Liu Xiaogan 刘笑敢, a professor of Daoist philosophy at Beijing Normal University, was born in 1947 and died on June 30. Each had made significant breakthroughs within his intellectual tradition, and each was well known within their scholarly communities.

The quiet public reactions to their deaths in both countries is a reflection of the broader public’s limited awareness of their specialized fields. Yet this relative silence points to a precarious condition shared by their respective countries: while the threat of a catastrophic and world-changing armed conflict between them looms, cultural and civilizational exchange takes place largely in obscurity.

The apparent similarity in the final moments of their careers disguises a deeper and increasingly urgent problem, one that has become a major source of international anxiety. The idea of​​ “multiple modernities,” proposed with renewed force at the turn of the twenty-first century[1] , does appear to describe a real emerging condition. Contemporary China is increasingly showing signs that its idea of​​ “modernity” differs profoundly from that of the West. As scholars of the same generation, Mair and Liu offer a revealing illustration of how “modernization” could progress along separate intellectual paths, even when those paths overlapped around the same ancient text.

The point of convergence in their scholarly lives may be traced back to 1972. That year, President Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China and met Mao Zedong, marking the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in the midst of the Cold War. In the United States, a New Age rendition of the Tao Te Ching appeared on the Christmas gift list of Time Magazine, signaling the ancient Chinese text’s emergence as a durable element of Western popular spirituality. In China that same year, archaeologists opened the Mawangdui tombs, which belonged to an aristocratic family of the early Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE). As the excavation continued over the following months, Tomb No. 3 was found to contain two silk manuscripts of the Dao De Jing, the Mawangdui silk manuscripts known as Manuscript A and Manuscript B（帛书版道德经 甲本 乙本）dating to approximately 168 BCE. These manuscripts were at least five centuries older than the commonly transmitted versions of the text.

In 1972, neither Mair nor Liu’s intellectual path had taken definitive shape. The photographic plates of the two restored silk manuscripts, together with full textual transcriptions, were first made available to scholars and the wider public in monographic form in 1976. At the time, Mair was pursuing Chinese studies at Harvard and completed his Ph.D. that year. Liu’s scholarly path was delayed more profoundly by historical circumstance. Being a native Chinese scholar in the latter half of the twentieth century did not necessarily bring him closer to the ancient Chinese text. On the contrary, Liu received his basic education during the time when traditional culture was condemned and classical texts were largely erased from formal educational programs. By the time Liu came of age, few in the population could read classical texts without the aid of vernacular translations. Only in 1978, when graduate admissions resumed after the Cultural Revolution, was Liu admitted to the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. He received his M.A. in philosophy in 1981.

In 1980, a much more refined and authoritative edition of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts was finally published. By the time Mair decided to translate Dao De Jing, he was fully aware of the almost insurmountable difficulty: the deceptive brevity of the text, the density of its language, and the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of interpretation. For two decades, he had vowed that he would “never attempt to translate the Tao Te Ching.” Yet the newly discovered Mawangdui manuscripts changed his mind. They made it possible, he believed, “to produce a totally new translation of the Tao Te Ching far more accurate and reliable than any published previously.” His translation appeared in 1990, three years before Liu received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Peking University in 1993. Liu subsequently became one of the most respected specialists in Daoist thought.

Since the second century A.D., there have been a staggering number of works devoted to the Dao De Jing, commentaries(注) and sub-commentaries (疏) that reinterpret the classic text and explain previous commentaries. Mair referred to the number as being “more than fifteen hundred.”

Following his predecessor British sinologist Arthur Waley (1889-1966), Mair treated these variations as obstacles to the true meaning of the original text. According to Waley in 1934: “All the commentaries, from Wang Pi’s (王弼《老子注》, ca. 240-249 AD) onwards down to the eighteenth century, are ‘scriptural’; that is to say that each commentator reinterprets the text according to his own particular tenets, without any intention or desire to discover what it meant originally. From my point of view, theyare therefore useless.” By using the earliest known manuscripts for translation, Mair thought “it possible to strip away the distortions and obfuscations of a tradition that has striven for two millennia to ‘improve’ the text with commentaries and interpretations more amenable to various religious, philosophical, and political persuasions.”

This view of the historical accumulation and textual variation of the Daodejing essentially marked the point at which Mair’s approach diverged from Liu Xiaogan’s. By the time Liu undertook his mature research on the text, an even earlier version had come to light: the Guodian Laozi on bamboo slips (郭店楚简本), unearthed in 1993 and generally dated to around 300 BCE. Its script is archaic; its contents amount to only about two-fifths of the most circulated text; and its chapter order differs substantially from the standard version. Liu was the first to compare, word by word, five of the most important versions, beginning with the earliest bamboo-slip version (原文对照). He then examined selected cases of textual variation in order to determine the nature of the text’s historical evolution (对勘举要). Finally, and importantly, he offered his own interpretation through the lens of modern philosophical training, largely in conversation with the Western intellectual tradition (析评引论).

Despite these different approaches, both scholars arrived at valuable insights. Mair was not the first to propose that the Dao De Jing had an oral prehistory before it became a relatively solidified written text. He was, however, one of the most forceful modern English-language advocates of that view. He made the argument persuasive by drawing attention to repetition, rhyme, formulaic phrasing, and homophonic patterns within the text; possibly influenced by Western scholarship on the oral traditions behind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Such a comparative perspective certainly enriches Chinese understanding of the pre-textual history of the Laozi, a crucial but still underexplored field. This is especially significant given the deep Chinese reverence for the written word, expressed in the classical phrase “writing carries the Dao.” (文以载道).

On the question of meaning, Liu Xiaogan made a breakthrough of his own. Through textual comparison, Liu sought to explain why the Laozi evolved as it did. In doing so, he confirmed, by modern empirical methods, something that traditional Chinese scholars have long implicitly understood and that twentieth-century scholars such as Yu Ying-shih described in currently comprehensible terms: “The reason classics remain ever fresh through the ages lies precisely in the fact that they offer different illuminations to readers of different periods, and even to different readers within the same period. But this does not mean that the interpretation of classics is entirely without objectivity, or that one may say whatever one pleases on a whim.”[2]

This distinction may be understood as the difference between “meaning” and “significance.”[3] The objectivity contained in the text belongs to its original meaning — the level of meaning that translators such as Arthur Waley and Victor Mair sought to recover through philological analysis. The Chinese classic, or jing 经, however, was never meant to be merely a fixed verbal object. It was a text designed to generate new insights with changing historical circumstances, allowing readers to engage it through the knowledge, experience, and concerns of their own age. Such contemporary insights may be called its “significance.”

Mair himself was deeply absorbed in the problem of meaning and indulged on the insight he gained. In preparing his translation, he wrote that he spent “two full months” searching for a satisfactory English equivalent for de 德. He finally chose “integrity” rather than “virtue,” because he wanted a word broader in scope and less narrowly moralistic in implication. Liu, by contrast, was not shy to discuss the contemporary significance of the text. In his work, “democracy” appears in connection with chapter 49, “science” with chapters 40 and 47, and “feminism” with chapter 6, among other examples.

By the time Mair published his translation in 1990, the Tao Te Ching had already appeared in well over a hundred English renditions. Since then, the number of English versions has continued to grow, with broad public lists now recording more than 175 renderings of the first chapter alone.[4] There are many readers and scholars in the West who have gained true insights from Laozi. Yet how such knowledge might be used, if at all, in the service of broader strategic interests remains unclear.

As we now understand it, Dao De Jing has been the foundational text of Chinese civilization, a living cultural project throughout its history. In China, the total number of studies of the Dao De Jing has been estimated at approximately 3,700 works by 2025.[5] Since the publication of the Mawangdui silk texts, an enormous number of annotated translations, specialized studies, and popular interpretations have appeared, far exceeding the total output of all previous eras combined. Although the general public remains largely unaware of developments in this specialized field, it is possible that some readers have already begun to apply insights drawn from Laozi to new domains such as artificial intelligence, management, and commercial strategy.

The breakthroughs that Mair and Liu brought to the Dao De Jing were therefore significant, each in their own way. Their parallel lives reveal more than a shared scholarly interest in an ancient classic. Their influence unfolded quietly within two separate intellectual traditions: the West and China. Together, they illuminate two distinct modern engagements with the Chinese classics, and perhaps also the increasingly consequential divergence between two modern worlds.

Endnotes:

[1] The phrase is most closely associated with the Israeli sociologist Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, especially his essay “Multiple Modernities” in the 2000 special issue of Dædalus.

[2] English translation by author of this article. Original quotation in Chinese by: 余英时Yu Ying-Shih,《犹记风吹水上鳞》You ji fengchui shui shang lin, 弘雅三民图书股份有限公司Hongya Sanming Book Co. Ltd., 2022.

[3] ”meaning” and “significance” are used in English in this otherwise Chinese text: 余英时Yu Ying-Shih,《犹记风吹水上鳞》You ji fengchui shui shang lin, 弘雅三民图书股份有限公司Hongya Sanming Book Co. Ltd., 2022.

[4] Statistic estimated by ChatGPT, 2026-07-06, Prompt Question: “How many English translations of the Tao Te Ching were there before and after Victor H. Mair’s translation?”

[5] Statistic estimated by DeepSeek, 2026-07-06, Prompt Question:「请估算一下中国历史上总共出版过多少对《道德经》的研究，请按时期列出 。」

(文章仅代表作者的观点和立场)